Cliff woke in his recliner shivering. Morning light was just starting to creep through the curtains, but he wanted to squeeze in a little more sleep. He reached around for a blanket, found one and pulled it onto himself. He sank back into slumber.

In a few seconds, he was awake again. Did something just walk across his face? Opening his eyes slowly, he saw that the blanket was covered in moving things. There was a half-dead mouse, a stunned mantis, a chewed-up locust, and other things with lots of legs. He jumped out of the chair and stripped off his clothes in a wild, panicky dance. Then he dashed into the bathroom for a series of showers.

Satisfied that the critters were all washed off, he relaxed in the cascade of warm water. He remembered hearing a story that cats sometimes brought dead or half-dead animals into the house as gifts to their owners. This gave him a chuckle. Crazy animals, who can understand them?

The cat wasn't even his. He was watching it for his sister. A week ago, he was unwinding from work in the usual way, with a bottle of stout in hand and old Warner Brothers cartoons on he television, when the doorbell rang. On the doorstep was his sister Jane, grinning sweetly with a pet carrier at her feet.

"Hi Cliff!"

"Oh, hi Sue. What brings you—"

"I'm going to Greece for two weeks and I need you to watch my kittie for me."

"Uh, gosh. I would love to, but..."

Before he could finish, she picked up the carrier and pushed it into his arms. As he started to protest, she began to recite a shopping list of details: what kind of food to feed him, things not to leave lying around, and other dos and don'ts. All of this he quickly forgot. He was going to hand the carrier back to her when she turned and skipped down the steps. Halfway to the car she stopped.

"Oh yeah. Her name is Bismarck. Ta ta!"

Without a word of thanks, she was gone, and Cliff was left holding a heavy crate with something hairy inside.

He was not in any way a lover of animals. He subscribed to the view of critters as mechanistic, self-serving automatons. They were forces of chaos, no different from erosion or typhoons. Like all of nature, they were meant to be conquered and cleaned up, moved out of the way, so humans could impose their polished right angles and crisp, shiny trim all over the universe.

Closing the door with an angry kick, he set the pet carrier down on the floor. He peered inside through the ventilation holes and a pair of unblinking green eyes stared back.

"I don't suppose I could just leave you in the box for the two weeks?"

The eyes still did not blink.

"No, I guess not. All right then."

He reached out slowly and unsnapped the latch, as if disarming a bomb, then backed away. The door popped open and bounced on the floor. A paw stretched out and touched the floor ever so gingerly. It was followed by a head, a body, and three more legs. Finally, the tail emerged and whipped about with a flourish. In a slow, precise motion the head turned and its eyes focused on him.

"Uh, hello," he said uncomfortably.

The cat walked away. Their introduction, such as it was, was over. There was never a bonding moment, no shared intimacy—not that he expected that kind of thing from animals.

The first day, he didn't see much of the cat. He would see glimpses of it peering around the corner or slinking behind the couch. This suited him fine. A hidden cat is not as good as no cat, but he could live with it for two weeks until Sue returned. This ideal roommate relationship did not last long.

Over the next few days, he noted progressively stranger events. Doors he was certain he had closed were open. Items in the refrigerator had gone missing. Books had "fallen" out of the shelf and been left open to certain pages. His old philosophy text, for instance, was left open on the page of Descartes where he states that animals are soulless automatons without creativity or intelligence. But worse than all of those things was the persistent feeling that he was being watched, studied, visually dissected, by a very unnerving pair of eyes.

Cliff resolved not to let it get to him. He was, after all, a superlatively good public relations manager and ombudsman. If he could defuse tension in other people, he could certainly resolve it in himself. Not to mention, he had a lot of home-brewed ale on hand. So, as he stepped out of the shower, he forced a chuckle at the antics of the cat.

He was still laughing as he brought a towel to his face. Almost immediately after beginning a vigorous rub, he realized something was wrong. Pulling the towel away, he saw it was covered in a brownish-green, mushy, fibrous substance. The cold guck was on his face as well. The cat had left him a hairball in his towel closet. He could have launched into a wild rage, but instead closed his eyes and summoned his deepest powers of calm. In moments, his blood pressure lowered and a serene smile appeared.

He went back into the shower. It was not worth getting upset over this dumb animal. He had the clear advantage, with his advanced brain and its prefrontal cortex, his dextrous opposable thumbs, and upright posture. He was laughing again.

He opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the hall, wrapped in a new, clean (and inspected for hairballs) towel. He was going to waggle his finger at the cat, that rascal. But where was it? He looked around the hall, then heard something in the living room. Strolling in, the smile on his face turned to horror. He yelped as if someone had poured the contents of an ice tray into his briefs.

The cat was there, by the bookshelf, rolling in an opened album of his stamp collection. Covered in rare, irreplaceable postage notes, it looked up as if to say, "oh hi, I'm just enjoying a good roll in these silly pieces of sticky paper." Hundreds of hours of painstaking labor mounting and cataloging precious, tiny documents were being obliterated by a fuzzy mouscatcher before his own eyes.

He stomped across the room, grabbed the cat by the waist and held it up to stare at it in the face. The absurdity of a naked man (his towel slipped off) raging silently at a cat completely escaped him. Shaking with rage, he said, "you ... horrible ... cat!"

Bismarck stared back unemotionally, unrepentant, uncaring.

Though he kept fantasizing about the things he could do to the cat with plastic wrap and duct tape, he forced himself to control his anger. He would not let a small mammal influence his superior self-control. He repeated a soothing mantra until his calmness returned. Gradually, the muscles in his face softened. He set the cat back down on the floor.

"All right then," he said with a forced smile. "I will just have to cat-proof this house."

He went around taking anything that could be damaged by a cat and moving it into the bedroom. When a huge pile of stuff had accumulated on and around the bed, he closed the door. After thinking for a moment, he moved a hamper in front of the door. He exhaled and wiped his brow, perspiring from the effort.

Looking at his watch, he had a shock. "I'm running late!" He rushed to get dressed and ready for work. Then raced to the door with his briefcase, pausing long enough to point at the cat and warn, "no shenanigans!"

He started to jog down the street, his feet coming down painfully on the pavement in un-cushioned work shoes. It was times like this that he wished he had a car. This bus he had to catch came only once an hour and he had an early meeting at work. After about a minute, he was already exhausted and sweating terribly in his suit, but he continued to walk briskly, swinging his briefcase like a pendulum.

He looked at his watch again. There was a good chance he would miss the bus. He had no choice but to take a shortcut through the park. This Memorial-something park was a few dozen acres of turf with an artificial lake and some huge old oaks. Near the center was marble plinth topped with a green copper statue of a soldier shouldering his gun and looking important. Like all such statues in parks, it was liberally coated in guano.

The park was always fairly busy with birds, loudly chattering like members of some parliament, but today it seemed there were many more birds than usual. The trees were practically frothing with them. As he huffed by, he wondered why so many birds should choose this time and place to rendezvous. Maybe it was the day the local bakery scraped the crumbs off the racks outside? Or perhaps it was a crucial stop on a migration? Well, whatever. He had a bus to catch.

As he reached the middle of the park, the cacophany stopped quite suddenly, as if all the birds had gotten a signal to cease their raucus socializing and become as one, silent observer. Despite himself, he glanced over his shoulder. It appeared that all of the birds—every single one—was facing him, their shiny black eyes tracking his movement. What's more, he sensed (somehow) that the birds were not afraid of him.

"Okay, that's creepy," he said to himself.

In just another minute he would be out of the park. It was strange, he knew, to be afraid like this, but he couldn't help himself. He was spooked. The day had started off strangely; maybe that was it. He started to jog a little, just to put some more distance between himself and the freakish birds. And also to catch the bus, of course.

It was then that the birds took off.

In that weird way that birds have of acting in unison, they all leapt into the air at the same instant. They arced upward and then down, as if racing toward the ground. Cliff heard the fluttering like an avalanche all around him. Looking over his shoulder again, he quickly determined that their trajectory was ... him.

Innumerable black shapes clotted the air around him, raucously skawking and squeeking. The cacophony made his eardrums pucker. He covered his ears, but in a moment, the birds were all settling down on the ground. They landed in a ring around him, a shiny black barrier of birds were standing in the grass. He stopped running and froze.

"What the hell is going on here?"

These birds were behaving totally unlike the way they were supposed to be. They were not timid or disorganized. The only prior time he had heard about birds doing something like this was... no, he tried desperately not to think about Alfred Hitchcock. There has to be a rational explanation.

"Maybe they... oh dear, no, I hope that's not it."

He had been hearing occasional news stories about birds contracting diseases from mosquitoes. In his mind, this got confused with what little he knew about rabies, a disease that makes mammals go into fever-driven tantrums. What if, he thought with rising panic, these are mad birds? They could bite me, and then...

He started to hyperventilate a little. Well, at least they weren't coming any closer. But his escape was blocked on all sides by a thick crowd of crazy avians. He needed to do something to break the stalemate. His first idea was to call out for help. He managed a half-hearted shout.

"Is... is there anybody around? Hello? Uh... help me please?"

He couldn't have known it, but no amount of yelling would have helped him. Anyone who might have had reason to be nearby had been re-routed to some kind of appointment or emergency. All roads in the area were blocked with constructions barriers and traffic signals locked on "red" in all directions. Someone had gone to great lengths to isolate Cliff in this park.

Perhaps his next idea had a slightly better chance of succeeding: run through the ring. If these birds were infected with some disease like rabies, they might manage a few pecks at most. He would cover his eyes with his hands to protect them. If they did bite him, well doctors would know what to do. They had antidotes or something, right? More and more this seemed like the right thing to do, and he felt a little braver. They were just little specks of meat and feathers, after all.

Bracing his feet, he prepared to make his escape. The message left his brain and raced down the nerve highway to his legs. It was supposed to say, "get going now!" But when it got there, all it said was, "uh... whatever." The legs twitched, but stayed where they were. Cliff thought maybe his feet were stuck in mud. He tried to wiggle them free, but they refused to respond.

With a huge effort, he managed to flex his knees enough to dive forward. What this was supposed to accomplish, Cliff had no idea. Propelled through the air, Cliff saw himself drift over the ring of birds, but not all the way over. He realized with horror that he was destined to land on top of the birds. They were only mildly surprised by this, and easily moved out of the way. Cliff landed on bare grass like a rag doll.

His entire body was paralyzed now, from the chest down. He managed to roll himself over with his arms before they, too, went limp. He turned his head sideways to see tiny yellow legs marching through the grass blades. The birds moved with terrible slowness, in unison like a giant, feathered, irridescent blob. When they were close enough for Cliff to see their little nostrils flaring, they stopped.

There was no doubt now the birds were doing this to him. The power of their minds, unified, directed at him through their terrible eyes, was like a thousand liliputian ropes holding him down. He struggled to defy the signals, but eventually the will to fight left him.

From the midst of the starlings, a small, brightly-colored bird hopped into view. It paused just a moment before a spasm of wing flapping carried it up to his chest. He barely felt it land, the thing was so light. It turned sideways and stared down at him with an eye on the side of its head. It was as if the little tuft were saying, "how pathetic."

The bird jumped up and flew right over his head. It did not go far, though. Cliff heard it land right behind him. He wanted desperately to know what it was doing back there, but he could no longer move his head. He stared up at the sky, waiting for what would happen next.

Without any warning, there was a stabbing pain in his skull, as if a mountaineer's pick had struck there. The pain slowly lessened, turning into a liquid heat that spread down his head and through his brain. He tried to reach up and protect his head, but he was inert as a slab of meat in the grass. A moment later, he felt himself growing tired, unable to prop up his flagging consciousness. The sky drained of color and narrowed as if he were falling backwards into a pit.